Tondabayashi Jinaimachi

photo by ほっきー · CC BY-SA 4.0

photo by Otraff · CC BY-SA 3.0

The only protected district in the whole of Osaka: 12.9 hectares, and people still live there.

The wooden houses with white walls and wooden lattices line narrow streets that you walk along and where people live: they are private homes, not an open-air museum. The only one you can really visit is the Sugiyama House, belonging to a family that founded the town and then made sake for two centuries.

Autonomous religious town founded in 1560 around the betsuin of Kōshō-ji, when the sixteenth abbot, Shōshu, obtained the land for it. On 31 October 1997 it was selected as an Important Preservation District for Groups of Traditional Buildings (the only one in the whole of Osaka Prefecture), covering 12.9 hectares, and in August 2018 the selection was extended. It is classified as both a temple town and a rural market town.

ℹ️ The district is made up of public streets and you can walk round it at any time, but these are lived-in houses: you do not go into the courtyards and you do not take photos inside. The Sugiyama House, an Important Cultural Property since 1983, is open 10:00–17:00 and costs 400 yen for adults and 200 up to high school; it is closed on Mondays (Tuesdays if Monday is a public holiday) and from 29 December to 3 January. Seven minutes on foot from Tondabayashi-nishiguchi Station on the Kintetsu Nagano Line.

🚉 Tondabayashi · 8 min walk

Sources: ja.wikipedia.org · denken.gr.jp · jinaimachi.net

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